


It leans, and hearkens after it

by gogollescent



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-16 13:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cordelia and Miles talk post-<i>Cryoburn.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	It leans, and hearkens after it

It was almost dusk; the sky a sunless blue. Miles had been drafting a proposal for the Council, but now he stopped to rub his wrists and look anywhere but at the console. The scars looped each forearm completely, white and depressed, so that his hands might have been attached as an afterthought to his more naked arms. When he stood he was dizzy and his fingers sought the chair, the desk's edge, some grounding contact. He misjudged the distance, however, and only flapped a little before stilling.

A shadow in the doorway. "My lord?" said Roic, in his 'just passing by, and definitely not here because I was sent by your lady wife to make sure you haven't become one with the keyboard' voice. Miles duly gave him the 'I have all your voices indexed and numbered' look.

"Your lady wife sent me to check on you," Roic said.

Well. Perhaps not all.

"Tell her I'm fine, would you?" said Miles. "Just, erm, regrouping."

"Of course, sir."

He turned to go, probably to deliver a damning message about blood sugar to the woman in question. "Roic?"

"Yes, m'lord?"

"Have you seen my mother around?"

A complex string of expressions crossed Roic's uncomplex face. "I think she's in the garden," he said, warily.

"Thanks."

He waited until Roic was halfway down the stairs, then went out himself, taking the lift tube down. Might have been an unnecessary precaution; he passed no one on the lower levels. Where were the children, he wondered, and then remembered that they were staying with the Koudelkas-- Drou and Kou, stripped of all resident offspring over the past five years by determined blonde romance, had developed the most menacing case of grandparent envy he'd ever seen; one imagined them stalking the streets for a shot at unclaimed children, their footsteps grimly synchronized after decades of marriage. God only knew what they were doing to the local babysitters' rates. But it was convenient to be able to pack all the squirts off to a house they were happy to visit, rather than disposing of them in shifts-- Helen and Aral to Ivan, Lizzie to Aunt Alys, Nikolai to-- well, flight school now. Trying to offload his beloved spawn in staggered rotations made him feel like he was back at the Academy himself.

He'd had plans, actually, to make use of the evening alone, once he'd finished his draft. Admittedly they included items such as "sit next to Ekaterin and stare in awed reverie at Taurie's new growth of hair", but still. He hadn't even been thinking about his mother, who had been back on Barrayar for three months, and only this past week joined them at the manor. It frustrated him, how much he sometimes forgot. Hitherto undiscovered cryodamage, he suggested to Rowen, and she said, maybe you're getting old.

Getting? he could have replied.

In the garden Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan looked as alien as she no longer did among the peers of the land; but then, everyone did, in Ekaterin's garden. Somehow the rust red of Barrayaran foliage, though it should have echoed the tones of human skin, human blood, instead denied it all: look at yourself, it seemed to say, how deep will you have to dig to find any trace of this? Even her roan hair was shrouded in grey. She sat amidst the undergrowth like a prophecy of winter.

"You've got ink on your nose," she said.

"Impossible," said Miles, and added, virtuously, "I wasn't using a flimsy."

"Nevertheless," said his mother, but she refrained from actually getting out a handkerchief for him to spit on, which he would accept as perfect victory. She was wearing jeans, he realized, an occasion almost unprecedented in his experience except by certain weeks of the Third Cetagandan War. "We're not going to war, are we?"

She stared at him. He relaxed.

"You tell me," she said, with deliberate irony. Which he supposed was fair; for more than half his life now it had been a point of professional pride to know about wars before they happened, usually because they didn't actually happen, usually because he knew about them. His mother just ended them. A difference of approach.

"All's calm on the three-dimensional Barrayaran space front," he said, sitting on the bench next to her. A pause. "Except for this damn business with Vorhalas' inheritance--"

The Dowager Countess held up a hand. "Miles, you are my dear son and I love you, but you've already used me as a sounding board for your speech to the Council twice this week. Maybe you need to expand your practice audience, hmm? Look for someone who's not familially obliged to find your parentheticals charming."

"You didn't like the parentheticals?"

The look she shot him was, in a word, bleak. My mother, he thought, with a weird flare of pride, which hurt him more than it warmed.

She'd been crying. He had seen that from the start, but his mother by long habit answered consolation with consolation, an effortless one-upmanship of courage; and he didn't want to tax her, or himself. But it was profoundly unlikely that he would draw her out with political jokes, and he found, in any case, that he lacked the stomach for it.

"Did you and Father ever spend time here?" he said. "When I was a boy, I mean, or--"

"Yes," said Cordelia. "Mostly huddled under the oak tree, surrounded by ImpSec agents." Her eyes were wry. "You don't need to worry about nostalgia for vegetation past, I promise you."

"I wasn't," Miles lied, thinking, _So that's what Simon left those trees in for_. It was a wonder no one before Mark had ever set fire to them.

"Hmm," said his mother. "I do have some more recent memories of him, though. Here."

His surprise must have shown on his face. "I didn't stop accruing material for my aged maternal anecdotes after you hit twenty, Miles."

"I never imagined otherwise," he said; if anything she'd raised the rate of acquisition, he was pretty sure. "I just-- didn't know the two of you spent enough time here to do much. Accruing."

She let out a little sigh, perhaps involuntary. "I can see-- no. It's true. We were so busy on Sergyar. Hardly saw anything of Barrayar, that whole decade. I think he was glad of the chance at escape," she added.

"Weren't you?" he asked. She looked at him levelly, as if to say: I'm here, aren't I?

"Are you?" he said, though she had made no audible reply. He was remembering every fight his parents had never had. All the love his mother had poured into his father, to make him a man worth surrendering worlds for; and her left at the end with the world he'd died of. _I bet Aral that you would choose the little admiral._ And he would have bet that by the six month anniversary of his father's death his mother would be on Beta Colony, or somewhere far farther, somewhere never touched by any human until her own boots broke its soil; but here, in the event, they were, Count Vorkosigan and the Dowager Countess, surrounded by planned growth.

She shifted, and watching her he thought suddenly of Bothari, devout beyond reason. But this was his mother, for whom there had always been-- if not reason, then a cause; the difference perhaps between desire and secret fear. She looked austerely at her hands and he tried to take comfort from her unchanged profile. All his life, he had believed his mother to be a part of Barrayar, as inextricable from it as his da. Against everything he had ever been told.

Well, Aral Vorkosigan was gone. Bothari lay at his feet. And at some point, in the dark-- without anyone watching to see how it was done-- his mother had decided to stay.

"I couldn't have kept the Vicereine post," she said, when the silence was complete.

He said nothing. She rose from the bench to pace the path restlessly. Said, "Or I didn't want to." She laughed, sounding surprised. "God! I didn't want to. The best of all possible reasons. To think that before you were born, there was one man on the whole benighted planet who could rule it at reasonable cost. Not that poor Gregor's spoiled for choice now, when it comes to his representatives, but he doesn't have to blackmail people from his deathbed, does he?" She laughed again. "Put it down to population growth. The luxury of a choice."

"Also better examples," said Miles, "for this generation."

She stopped, mid-stride.

"Oh, Miles. I'm sorry," she said, in a tone far removed from the giddy self-loathing of a moment earlier. "My sweet boy. I shouldn't--"

"Tell me forty-year-old state secrets?"

Her smile like a flinch. "Treat you as if you were a confession box, I was going to say."

"You haven't," he says, and then, frankly, "You never will." Did he sound wistful? He was thinking, Mother, you let me talk to you about Father until my tongue revolted inside my mouth; you held me as awkwardly as if I weren't still, always, the size of a child. You tried to leaven my grief by applying your own like a scalpel.

"Come here, kiddo," said Cordelia gruffly, stepping forward, hands extended before her in the first half of a soggy embrace. He would meet it in a moment. First, he wanted to look at her. Taller than any of the half-grown saplings, she stood alone against their beauty: her bare bright head surmounted by a dome of empty sky.


End file.
